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Andre Alexis’ The Hidden Keys pays off with meaning over money

RC

By Robert CollisonSpecial to the Star

Sun., Sept. 18, 2016timer3 min. read

No one can accuse Andre Alexis of lacking ambition. The Toronto-based novelist is presently at work on a quincunx, a series of five interrelated novels, one of which, Fifteen Dogs, won last year’s Giller Prize. Alexis now brings us the third book in the series, The Hidden Keys, a classically based, page-turning caper novel, which focuses on deciphering the clues necessary to locate a hidden fortune. The new novel, Alexis says at the back of the book, is inspired by “Captain George North’s Treasure Island” the pseudonym under which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the iconic children’s novel about questing for buried gold on a far-off tropical island with all the de rigueur hidden maps, false starts, backstabbing and betrayals.

The setting for Alexis’s Treasure Island Redux, however, is far from the tropics. Set in contemporary Toronto, The Hidden Keys opens with a heroin-addicted socialite named Willow Azarian inveigling a professional thief to steal four mementos mori her late father Robert had given her siblings on his death. Each, she believes, is embedded with information that will possibly lead them to a hundred million dollar jackpot. Not that any of the Azarian kids really need the cash. The clan is Thomson or Weston rich, and on their dad’s death, each received a billion bucks.

But here’s where the plot thickens. Willow’s siblings suspect the whole affair is a giant ruse concocted by their father to keep her focused on the family, and its fortune, instead of mainlining junk. Sadly, Robert’s “intervention” comes too late and Willow dies before the caper gets off the ground. But the thief, an intriguing character named Tancred Palmieri, turns out to be a person of principle and man of his word, odd character traits in a guy in his line of work, no? Tancred promised the hapless heiress he would resolve the mystery and that’s what he intends to do. Unfortunately, addiction was not Willow’s only affliction; she was also wildly indiscreet and had told her drug dealer, a really nasty piece of work called Errol Colby — an albino black man whose nickname is the “N” word — about the hidden stash.

Along with a club-footed sociopath named Sigismund — “Freud” — Luxemberg, he intends to muscle his way into the scheme by threatening to rough up Tancred’s innocent young sidekick Ollie. To further complicate this exceedingly internecine whodunit, Tancred’s best buddy since childhood, Daniel Mandelshtam, is the cop assigned to investigate the case of the stolen mementos. His late father, Baruch, had adopted the essentially fatherless Tancred, so the two of them, the cop and the con, are “almost” blood.

Although, at times The Hidden Keys reads like a mainstream criminal caper, the book’s numerous emotional and ethical trip lines give it more moral depth. Think of this book as rather a crime-novel hybrid: Agatha Christie meets Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the dark-humoured French novelist whom Alexis admired as a young writer. As he noted in his essay, “Of Smallness in the Soul,” published in Canadian Notes & Queries earlier this year, he was enthralled by Celine’s “voice” (despite the author’s anti-Semitism) which others deftly suggest captures a vision of human existence rooted in suffering, inertia, greed. That vision resonates in Alexis’ new novel.

At the end of the novel our unlikely hero, Tancred Palmieri, is forced to confront some hard truths about himself: a man who lived in the shadows and stole for a living under the cover of noble intentions. So the twenty-eight-year-old determines to change his life and become more like his friend Ollie who had chosen “moment after moment to be a father, to be virtuous. Ollie had learned to make a habit of the things he’d chosen to be. He would follow Ollie’s example and choose a life away from exhilaration and adrenalin, until the new life became a habit.”

That existential decision of Tancred’s is likely the real payoff at the end of a quest that turned out to be, ironically, more a search for meaning than money.

Arguably the most ubiquitous character in The Hidden Keys is Toronto, itself: from seedy Parkdale, where Palmieri and Colby perfect their cons, to tony Rosedale, where the Azarians perfect their entitlements, to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto’s garden of death, curiously central to resolving the Azarian mystery.

So was there indeed a hidden stash once the mystery was resolved? And did Tancred outwit the thugs? No spoilers here.

Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.

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